The 3rd Generation Partnership Project. (3GPP) is a collaboration agreement that was established in December 1998. The collaboration agreement brings together a number of telecommunications standards bodies which are known as organizational partners. The original scope of 3GPP was to produce globally applicable technical specifications and technical reports for a 3rd Generation Mobile System based on evolved Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) core networks and the radio access technologies that they support (i.e., Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA), both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) modes). The scope was subsequently amended to include the maintenance and development of the GSM technical specifications and technical reports including evolved radio access technologies (e.g., General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE)).
A systematic Raptor code is adopted as the application layer forward error correction (FEC) code for 3GPP Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS). To decode a, Raptor code, a decoder typically constructs a system of linear equations and uses Gaussian elimination to solve the equations. However, when the system is not of full rank (i.e., the received source and parity packets are not adequate for a complete decoding), the decoder usually declares failure and only outputs the received source packets.